


Halved

by Haely_Potter



Series: Bending the Universe [12]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Gen, Reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-21
Updated: 2013-10-21
Packaged: 2017-12-30 02:11:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1012809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haely_Potter/pseuds/Haely_Potter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor has a shadow, a golden one. One that only River can see. One that calls herself Bad Wolf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halved

The Doctor has a shadow.

No, not that kind of shadow, everyone has one, but a different kind.

One that only River could see.

The shadow was a woman immersed in golden light, so that River could see her in darkness but that she didn’t exude the light. She didn’t glow. She never spoke or did anything. She barely ever moved. (Once or twice River saw her raise a hand and something happened. A bullet would change direction and instead of hitting the Doctor, would sail harmlessly a few inches past. A pursuer would stumble, giving the Doctor time to make a run for it. That sort of things.)

But she was always there.

Always.

River never spoke of her.

River never spoke _to_ her.

Well, once.

She’d been young then, not yet completely understanding the responsibilities of a half-Time Lady. She’d wanted to meet all the Doctors, not just the one she’d tried to kill in Berlin. Eleventh, her sources said. That had meant there were ten other Doctors to meet.

So she’d gotten her hands on a vortex manipulator and a list of confirmed dates and places where the Doctor had been and had gone to meet him.

He was running on the London street with a blond girl by his side. The traffic was jammed and there were soldiers ahead, blocking the road. River tried shouting for the Doctor but the din of the city drowned her out. She was making her way through the throng of people and cars when the golden woman appeared in front of her.

“Not today, Melody,” she said, her voice oddly reverberating and golden eyes trained on River.

“Why not?” asked River, not even surprised she knew her real name.

“My Doctor’s past is like it is for a reason. You need not worry over it.”

“I want to meet them all,” River argued.

“There is only my Doctor, no matter the face he wears.”

“But they’re all so different,” River continued arguing.

The woman tilted her head slightly. “If you truly think that, maybe you’re not fit for the role chosen for you, child of my sister.”

River looked at her. “Who are you?”

“I am the Bad Wolf. I am forever and never. Always and not at all. I am all that was, all that is, all that could be and all that should not. I am Time’s youngest daughter and sister of my Doctor’s TARDIS. I am the echo of the beloved of my Doctor, protecting him through his life as she would have had he let her. I will only disappear when she comes back to claim our Doctor, for I will only share him with myself. Heed my words Melody Pond, for the Doctor shall never be yours, and the road you will choose shall lead to heartbreak.”

She then disappeared and River looked to where the Doctor had stood, only to find him and his companion gone. With a sigh she pushed the return button on her vortex manipulator and hopped back to Luna University. She now had something else to research. This Bad Wolf seemed like she was intertwined with the Doctor…

She didn’t interact with Bad Wolf after that. But she did ask the Doctor about… her.

“I came across a term in my research once,” she said to the Doctor (not the past Doctor she so often saw, but her husband (Hah! That shows what the Bad Wolf knew.)), snuggled up to him in the TARDIS library.

“What was it?” he asked, turning a page in his book.

River glanced at the golden woman standing impassively in the corner. “Bad Wolf,” she said, looking intently at the Doctor’s face.

The moment he registered what she’d said, hope and dread filled his eyes. Seriously he closed his book and he turned to look at her. “River, where did you come across those words?”

“Just a book on ancient legends. You and Bad Wolf seemed to be… related somehow.”

The hope had died in his eyes. “Yes… I suppose we’d be,” he sighed.

“Well?” she prompted when he didn’t say anything.

He startled, obviously deep in thought. “Oh! Well… Bad Wolf… she… I don’t know how to describe her…”

“The legend said she was yours,” River said, “and that you were hers.”

“Yes, yes, we were, and I suppose still are, in a way,” he agreed. “Bad Wolf was a deity, I think. I don’t rightly know. I knew her for a minute. In that minute she destroyed a whole fleet of Daleks and brought Jack back to life indefinitely. She sent the words Bad Wolf all across time and space to lead herself there, to rescue me.” He smiled slightly. “She saved me so many times. When we first met, she saved me when she should have been running for her life. She… she brought me back down to Earth when I thought I was always right. She… she believed in me. She didn’t have the blind faith Amy had, but the one born of seeing me find ways around obstacles and face my demons. She stood between me and a Dalek while I pointed a gun at her. The Dalek just wanted to feel the sunshine. She had the nerve to ask what I was changing into,” he laughed, voice breaking.

River felt like he was talking of two different people, of Bad Wolf and the one Bad Wolf had called the Doctor’s beloved. “Who was she?”

“Rose Tyler,” the Doctor said tenderly before standing up suddenly and walking out of the room, trying to wipe his eyes discreetly and not succeeding. Bad Wolf followed him as always, sparing River a glance before gliding through the door.

Soon after that the Doctor took her to Darillium to see the Singing Towers and gave her his sonic screwdriver. Two weeks later, she was recruited to lead the expedition to the Library where the Doctor met her for the first time. Bad Wolf was there, silent and golden as always.

It felt strange to have her consciousness extracted from the data core, River later admitted. To have her own thoughts instead of being part of a collective data cloud. The Doctor caught her newly materialized body, Bad Wolf standing impassively behind him, golden eyes intense but far away.

It was a few years later in the far past that Bad Wolf looked up, interested for the first time. The way the Doctor gaped at her told River that he could see her now.

“It is time,” Bad Wolf said with a half smile when a sea green TARDIS materialized in front of them.

“Time for what?” asked the Doctor, panic clear in his voice. “What have you done?”

“Guarded you like you wouldn’t let my other half do,” Bad Wolf smiled at him when the TARDIS doors opened and a woman identical to Bad Wolf stepped out, save the golden eyes. She walked over to the Doctor and kissed his cheek. “I am the Bad Wolf, the part separated from myself to keep my promise of forever before I made it. Now I will be whole again,” she said and walked over to the woman identical to her. She stepped inside the other woman’s welcoming arms and faded into the hug. The other woman’s eyes flashed golden before fading back to warm hazel. She shook her head as if to clear her thoughts.

“Rose,” the Doctor whispered, holding his hands uncertainly close to his chest. River knew that was the Doctor’s way of keeping himself from doing something he really wanted, like caressing this new woman or drawing her close. Normally he only did that with her, wrung his hands. Was this what Bad Wolf had meant all those years ago, that the Doctor would never be hers? That he would go right back to this Rose?

“Hello Doctor,” the woman, Rose said with a tongue-touched smile.

“Long time no see,” he said hoarsely.

“Yeah, been busy, y’know,” she answered, her smile widening. “At least there’s no Daleks this time. An’ you’re not dying, are you?”

The Doctor shook his head ever so slightly. “How… how long…?”

“Since Bad Wolf Bay? Close to four centuries. Took me an’ Beauty there that long to find a way back here,” Rose answered, her smile diminishing slightly. “I watched all my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren die a long time ago. John went twenty years after my mum and Pete. Tony and his family had been in a zeppelin accident five years before mum.”

The Doctor opened his mouth but nothing came out except a small, strangled sound. He’d curled in on himself, eyes miraculously still on Rose.

“I know it’s not exactly what you wanted when you left me behind, but as long as it lasted, it was fantastic.” Rose slowly walked over to him and brought a hand to his cheek. He leaned into it, like a puppy starved of affection. “Please, don’t do it again. I may not be 1247 but I’m a big girl now, and I can make my own decisions.”

“It’s still one hell of an age gap,” he said, earning a small laugh, like some inside joke.

“Yeah, just the other way ‘round,” she told him. “I have a collective understanding of what Bad Wolf has been doing since you were born.” She moved her hand to thread her fingers through his hair. “’S longer than before.”

“And yours is the same,” he said, letting his hand reach out and caught a lock of her hair between his fingers. “Rose… is this a dream?”

“D’you often dream of me?”

“Every time I sleep.”

“An’ how often’s that been?”

“Whenever I couldn’t take it anymore and fell asleep where I stood.”

“You should be sleeping six hours every week!”

“It got… hard… after you weren’t there anymore. Me, then just over nine hundred, unable to sleep because I’d gotten used to being your pillow.”

“Oh, my daft alien,” she drew his forehead to rest on hers

“Your daft alien,” the Doctor repeated. “I never let you hear that sentence finish. But I’ve said it.”

“Go on, let me hear it.”

“Rose Tyler, I love you.”

River couldn’t take it any longer and before her husband kissed Rose, she used her vortex manipulator to hop away.


End file.
